Google dominated the search engine world quickly and seemingly with little effort. Backed by a better ranking algorithm, a philosophy to organize the world’s information, a mantra to do no evil, and a lot of funding from Silicon Valley millionaires, Google was able to attract some of the brightest minds in computer science early on taking established players like Alta Vista, AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft by surprise. During the late 1990’s the trend was moving away from search engines and instead each search engine was building what were known as ‘web portals’. The idea was that a user could set one page as their homepage and access email, news, maps, local business listings, stock information, and a search engine all in the same place. The Yahoo! website still looks much like this today.

Google’s dominance of the search engine portion of these portals was so thorough and swift that it left the portals no other option than to sign agreements with Google paying them to use their search engine results and abandoning their own. But Google didn’t stop there, they soon added their own advertising service called AdWords, an email service called Gmail, a map service called Google Maps, their own stock portal called Google Finance, a news search engine called Google News, and so on – working to make each service better than established players and hyping each one at their annual I/O conference and via Public Relations. This strategy is known as an Oblique Assault.

Imagine if you will two evenly matched armies of 10 soldiers each marching towards each other in rows 5-wide and two soldiers deep. In an Oblique Assault strategy (named after an Oblique Order) knowing how your opponent is marching towards you, you would take one line of soldiers on the right or left flank and make it 3 or even 4 soldiers deep leaving your other flank with less depth. The idea here is that your built up flank can more easily crush the enemy’s flank and then tear through their line in an L shape before they can break through your opposite flank. This allows an army of foot soldiers to force an enemy to fight at a ratio of 1:2 or more increasing the likelihood of your victory. In Google’s case they didn’t even have email, maps, etc… at first and even built their website to appear as a non-threat to the portals they sought to first siphon business away from. As it would turn out, search results also become the most financially lucrative of the services with the advent of contextual keyword based advertising giving Google a major advantage in terms of finances they could use to slowly dominate their competition. If you’ve used Google at all in the past two decades you would likely have noticed that they appear to use their own search results to push their competing services over the competition which shows how powerful the Oblique Assault can be when you’re able to execute it.

In the Oblique Assault you essentially want to find the most lucrative product or service for your target market and make yours absolutely the best then do everything possible to promote this to your audience. If possible getting your future competitors to adopt your solution then slowly making other product or service offerings over time that beat theirs.

Google is probably the best example of an Oblique Assault in the history of business, but let’s look at a more practical example. Let’s say your desire is to become the biggest house painting company in your region, but there’s already incumbent players here. Instead of starting a house painting business to compete with them, you instead start working as a subcontractor or on a niche part of the painting such as window frames, cabinets, interior walls, or ceilings. You get every major local house painting company to hire you and tout your better process for whatever it is you’re doing via pr and possibly even by having those companies write testimonials for you. Then once you feel you’ve dominated this small part of the job you launch your own house painting company – this is one of the reasons some contracts are structured with a non-compete agreement, to guard against such eventualities.

Pros vs. Cons
Pros: The Oblique Assault is a powerful maneuver allowing a quick, crushing, blow to the competition which can lead to years or decades of continued success as your slowly win at other portions of the market with little to no friction from your competitors.

Cons: The crushing blow can often times be seen coming fairly easily and many competitors will be wary of adopting your services if they get even a hint that you’ll later become a competitor. There’s also the chance that you select the wrong product or service for your Oblique Assault and end up giving the enemy the upper-hand. Consider this, if Larry Page and Sergey Brin had written a better algorithm for maps or stocks and Google had started as a map or stock data company, they would have never dominated Yahoo, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, AOL, MSN.com and other engines so easily and likely wouldn’t even exist today. Yahoo search engineers continued to innovate in the space creating one of their most notable algorithms TrustRank in 2006. Without very careful planning and research the Oblique Assault can backfire making it a fairly risky strategy to undertake.